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Local Agency and William Macgregor's Exploration of The 8 Local agency and William MacGregor’s exploration of the Trobriand Islands Andrew Connelly At the time of British New Guinea Administrator William MacGregor’s first visits to the Trobriand Islands in 1890 and 1891, the islands had been frequented by whalers for over 40 years and by traders for over a decade. However, this long history of European encounter and exchange in the Trobriands failed to result in the construction of a body of knowledge available to MacGregor, since many encounters were not recorded or were buried in ships’ logs, published information was widely scattered, and some regular visits were kept secret. Because of this, MacGregor ventured into an informational wilderness to ‘discover’ the islands for himself. On the other hand, these previous exchanges had produced a local body of shared knowledge that shaped his reception by Trobriand intermediaries, especially local chiefs who attempted to recruit him into exclusive exchange relationships. If not unrecognised by MacGregor, then at least unreported were the surely numerous interactions between Trobrianders and his Polynesian and Melanesian companions, whose presence and conduct would have been as significant for Trobrianders as MacGregor’s was. 161 BRoKERS AND BouNDARIES William MacGregor was born in Scotland and completed medical studies at Edinburgh, gaining his certificate in 1872. He then joined the British colonial service as a medical assistant, working in the Seychelles and Mauritius under Governor Sir Arthur Gordon, who encouraged him to take on administrative tasks as well. It was here that he first developed an interest in ‘native’ affairs and welfare. MacGregor followed Gordon to Fiji in 1874, where a string of appointments over 14 years amounted to an extended training course in colonial administration.1 Figure 8.1: William MacGregor, 1888. Source: State Library of Queensland. 1 Chief Medical and Health Officer, Receiver-General (Treasurer), Colonial Secretary and Acting Governor. Joyce 1971. 162 8 . LoCAL AGENCy & WILLIAM MACGREGoR’S ExpLoratioN oF THE TRoBRIAND ISLANDS MacGregor stepped ashore at Port Moresby in September 1888, where he was sworn in as Administrator after proclaiming the former British protectorate’s new status as the Crown Possession of British New Guinea. He would lead British New Guinea (long informally and later officially also known as Papua) for a decade, as Administrator until 1894, and as Lieutenant Governor from 1895 to 1898.2 MacGregor sought to encourage development such as gold mining and copra plantations in British New Guinea but, due to his earlier experiences under Gordon, and perhaps his medical background, he also valued protecting the Indigenous population from exploitation by Europeans.3 This often brought him into conflict with white elements of settler society. MacGregor viewed exploration as one of the responsibilities of his position and undertook many expeditions large and small to ‘discover’ and document the Territory’s geography, geology, natural history and population. He personally established initial government contact with many Papuan societies, and ‘pacification’ of hostile or warring groups was a priority. These expeditions were written up in despatches to MacGregor’s superior, the Governor of Queensland, and published as appendices in the British New Guinea annual reports. These official despatches, read with interest in colonial offices and drawing rooms across the British Empire, served as a narration of the new government’s self-discovery of its own territory and subjects. When MacGregor first arrived in 1890, Trobrianders had had face- to-face contact with seaborne Europeans for at least half a century, and had been familiar with the sight of European vessels for much longer. A long tradition of regional trade by seagoing canoe meant that Trobrianders were highly mobile, travelling throughout a large area of islands numbering in the hundreds, from Muyuw (Woodlark) in the east and the Louisiades in the south-east, to the D’Entrecasteaux and south-eastern coast of New Guinea to the south. They would have known of and likely interacted with Europeans long before any reached Trobriand shores. 2 MacGregor demanded this mainly symbolic promotion after his first five years. Joyce 1971: 118–119; Sinclair 2009: 135. 3 Joyce 1971: 141, 143, 167; see also Sinclair 2009. 163 BRoKERS AND BouNDARIES Figure 8.2: Map of Milne Bay Province, south-eastern Papua New Guinea, showing the Trobriands and surrounding islands in the Solomon Sea. Source: © The Australian National university, CAp Carto GIS. The first documented sighting of the Trobriands by Europeans was in 1793, when French Rear Admiral Bruni d’Entrecasteaux named the island group after his first lieutenant Denis de Trobriand whilst sailing past, and roughly charted the northern and eastern shores.4 Thirteen years later, British captain Abraham Bristow was frequenting the area, making contact with nearby Islanders and passing close to islands he logged as being at precisely the latitude of northern Kiriwina.5 Unrecorded meetings during this time would have been likely between such passers-by and Trobrianders either on the beach or at sea in their large sailing canoes. 4 Horner 1995: 183. 5 MacGillivray 1852, I: 175–176. 164 8 . LoCAL AGENCy & WILLIAM MACGREGoR’S ExpLoratioN oF THE TRoBRIAND ISLANDS Figure 8.3: First map of the Trobriands, detail from C. F. Beautemps-Beaupré, ‘Carte des Archipels des iles Salomon, de la Louisiade et de la Nouv.le Bretagne; situes a l’est de la Nouvelle Guinee / redigee par C.F. Beautemps-Beaupré, hydrographe sous-chef du depot g.al de la marine en 1806’, 1807. Source: National Library of Australia MAp Ra 82 (Copy 1) plate 21. By the early 1830s a more regular form of European contact was taking place, as whalers extended their hunt into the Solomon Sea.6 The first recorded direct encounter between Europeans and Trobriand Islanders comes through a brief account given by Captain R. L. Hunter of the British whaler Marshall Bennett, which dropped anchor off Cape Denis on north-western Kiriwina in October 1836. While Hunter’s men remained warily in their whaleboats, the Trobrianders there to receive them showed no hesitation, wading out to the boats with baskets of yams – as Hunter noted, ‘in fact, as many as we could find room for, of the finest yams I ever saw’, to exchange for hoop iron.7 Trobriand 6 Thomas Beale writes evocatively of being becalmed aboard the British whaler Kent north of the Lusancays (just west of the Trobriands) in 1832. Beale 1839: 310. 7 Hunter 1839: 38. 165 BRoKERS AND BouNDARIES yams were valued by whalers as a staple that was easily stored in barrels and kept well, and Hunter was surely not the first whaler to call into Cape Denis, as the Islanders’ readiness to trade indicates a well-worn routine on their part. The Trobriands became known as one of the few places in the region where whalers could safely come ashore to trade for food and gather wood and water without fear of attack, and the islands were regularly visited until the decline of the industry in the 1860s. By the 1840s, bêche de mer collectors and traders had joined the whalers visiting the area. Russian anthropologist Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay briefly visited the Trobriands in late November 1879, aboard theSadie F. Caller, a ‘smart three-masted American schooner’ engaged in the trade.8 Five years later, the German ethnologist and naturalist Otto Finsch called in briefly aboard the German steamerSamoa . Both men were pressed with carvings for trade. Finsch remarked that he already knew of the Trobriands’ ‘excellent yams’ before visiting, since small trading vessels had been coming down from German New Guinea to barter for them for some years.9 While these early visits had been recorded, apparently none of them were known to MacGregor in 1890. Information from these contacts was either buried in whaling logs and thick shipping atlases or published in foreign languages. It may be difficult to imagine today how disconnected various disciplinary, generic, regional and national information flows were at the time. Furthermore, others had good reason to keep their ‘discoveries’ in the islands a secret, so much so that facts surrounding this early contact period remain murky. Englishman William Whitten was one of the earliest ‘settlers’ in the islands of eastern British New Guinea, having arrived in the territory in 1874. Often humbly described as ‘a storekeeper at Samarai’ (a European settlement in China Strait off the eastern tip of New Guinea), he was a keen and opportunistic entrepreneur, soon making a good business outfitting the many miners that flocked to each new gold strike in the area.10 According to Leo Austen, an Australian resident magistrate in the Trobriands in the 1930s, Whitten and a Norwegian named Oscar Solberg had 8 Webster 1984: 223. 9 Finsch 1888: 204–210. Trobriand passage translated for the author by Hilary Howes. 10 Nelson 1976. 166 8 . LoCAL AGENCy & WILLIAM MACGREGoR’S ExpLoratioN oF THE TRoBRIAND ISLANDS established a ‘fishing station’ (actually a site for smoking and storing bêche-de-mer for occasional collection) on north-west Kiriwina in the 1880s.11 C. A. W. Monckton wrote that while trading in bêche de mer, Whitten became the first European to discover ‘that pearls of a fair quality existed in a small oyster forming one of the staple foods of the natives’, managing to keep this a secret and to ‘purchase large quantities of the pearls from the natives for almost nothing’ until the sale of his haul in Australia let the secret out, which ‘brought down upon him a host of other competitors’. While denied a possible fortune by the competition, Whitten had ‘made enough to bring a younger brother from England, purchase a bigger and better vessel, also a large amount of merchandise’, thereby laying the foundation for the formidable Whitten Bros holdings of the next several decades.12 Austen noted that Whitten’s friendships with Trobrianders were memorable enough that ‘the people have gone so far as to name a special dance after him.
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